A piece of art for a bathroom.

I recently completed a piece of art for a bathroom. The bathroom had just been painted in a shade of very dark blue. The bathroom suite is traditional white, and the tiles also white with a border of dark blue pattern.Something was needed to link the blue and white together. It needed to be fairly simple and contemporary. 

There are several large mirrors in the bathroom, so I decided mirror would be part of my design too. It also needed to be a square painting to fit the available space. I wanted to make it a textural mixed media painting so collected together some materials to use.

I have small mirror tiles, string, tissue paper and textured wallpaper.

I drew some wobbly vertical lines on the canvas and then stuck on some mirror tiles with PVA glue. These roughly followed one of the lines.

I added some strips of the textured wallpaper and sealed the edges of the mirror tiles with textured modelling paste. I tried to hide the squareness of the tiles by making the modelling paste irregular.

Next I added some string in wobbly vertical lines. I stuck this on with lots of PVA glue. The edges will be attached around the back later on.

I then used tissue paper with glue to make some dimensional lines. These took about 24 hours to dry!

Next I added a layer of white paint over the whole thing. I  used white ceiling paint, as it is just an underneath layer. 

The five photos above show areas of detail and colour being built up. I also added in a third row of mirror. However I did not use the tiles for this row. I broke up a small mirror to get some smaller pointed shapes.

I have used crackle glaze. I painted the section dark blue, then added a layer of crackle glaze. When it was dry I added white acrylic paint and watched the crackles develop!

I painted another section with acrylic gel medium, mixed with white and blue paint. I swirled it all up and left it to dry.

I also did an area with white mica flakes over blue paint. I added lots of clear varnish to seal it in. 

I painted over the white textured wallpaper areas with white acrylic and a layer of blue glitter glue.

I painted a few white lines on top of pale blue areas just to break them up a bit.

I then used a dark blue paint ( the same as the bathroom walls) to define a few edges. I painted over the string. This was quite fiddly to do as you have to keep the sides neat.

I continued to build up the areas of dark blue paint.

The final painting, on the bathroom wall. I have added more dark blue areas, so these shapes tend to blend in to the wall.  I added a good coat of clear varnish as the painting is in a moist environment.  The overall effect is good. The small areas of mirror tile work well as they catch the light.

It is a simple design , but works well in a modern bathroom. You would not want a fussy over detailed piece. 

It was also quite good fun to make!